Matrox Reveals Parhelia Particulars

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Dan Wood, VP of Marketing at Matrox, has a lot to say about his company’s upcoming Parhelia GPU and boards. We thought you should have some additional information that didn’t get covered in our architectural preview of Parhelia, “Matrox Storms Back into 3D“. We were able to find out more details about how (and when) some of Parhelia’s key features will be implemented in usable applications. And while Surround Gaming will in all likelihood be of significant interest to ExtremeTech regulars (we’ve got a list of currently and soon-to-be supported titles), some other interesting info McNuggets came to light in this conversation.

So gird yourself for a 3D GPU technology onslaught and enjoy our interview with Dan.

ExtremeTech: The burning question on most techies’ minds is: what are Parhelia’s core and memory clock rates going to be, and are you going to offer speed-binned variants of Parhelia the same way that Nvidia currently does with GeForce 4?

Dan Wood: The Parhelia will ship in a number of configurations. The 128MB retail product (“R” version) will have core clocks of 220MHz and memory clocks running at 275MHz. The 128MB bulk product will have core clocks of 200MHz and memory clocks at 250MHz (“B” version). Later in the summer, Matrox will be releasing 64MB and 256MB versions of the card, which will also be speed-binned, and it is likely that the 256MB version of the board will offer the highest clocks. Because of its advanced architecture, the Parhelia will offer leading performance in a number of areas, but will lag in others due to its lower clocks. The Parhelia will lead the industry in quad texturing, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliased performance, but for simpler rendering conditions, the Parhelia’s performance will be limited by being only a 4-pixel-per-clock engine. The vision behind the Parhelia was that it was more important to sustain high performance with quality features enabled and to offer innovative new features like Surround Gaming than to focus our engineering investment on making a part that only delivered high (and sometimes meaningless) benchmark numbers with lower quality settings. Other companies are already doing that, and Matrox’s goal is to offer different solutions to the market.

ET: How do you expect Parhelia to stack up versus the competition, particularly versus Nvidia’s GeForce 4 Ti 4600? Are there areas where you believe you have specific advantages and disadvantages? Please elaborate.

DW: We believe that Parhelia is in a class all of its own. In the Parhelia, Matrox has integrated a large number of new technologies, which have immediate benefits to our end users with real applications. The focus is on image quality, the widest support for multi-display desktops, unique new anti-aliasing algorithms, increased quality at excellent performance levels. There should be a fun benchmark for PC enthusiasts. Playing games with Surround Gaming enabled is just a lot more fun. It is really something that you have to experience for yourself to fully appreciate. For the professional users, we believe that we’re the only company that is bringing innovative, useful new technology to the plate (GigaColor, Glyph anti-aliasing, TripleHead, Dual DVI at 1600×1200, highest fidelity outputs, 10-bit RAMDACs).

ET: What kind of vertex/triangle throughput performance can we expect from Parhelia?

DW: With four 128-bit DirectX9.0 vertex shaders operating in parallel, the Parhelia is capable of very high programmable vertex throughput. Most of the instructions in the DX9.0 vertex shader 2.0 spec run on the Parhelia’s ALUs in one clock. The raw vertex throughput for simple vertex operations is >100M vert/sec. The drawn triangle throughput is 37M front facing triangles per second. The reason for this discrepancy is that we have found that most apps are not actually T&L limited by the number of drawn triangles, but rather become T&L limited when long vertex shader programs are applied. So–like for many other aspects of the Parhelia–the focus is on sustaining performance for the complex case rather than simply bragging about large numbers in a simple, low-complexity case that won’t actually be used. A more impressive triangle rate is that the Parhelia is capable of sustaining ~ 10 Mtri/sec in the case of 90-instruction-long programmable vertex shaders.

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